New Music Friday: Stream projects from Floating Points, Wendy Eisenberg, and more

Those who only know Sam Shepard’s Floating Points project from Promises, his stunning collaboration with the late Pharoah Sanders and the London Symphony Orchestra, might be taken aback by Cascade at first. Shepard is out of the orchestra pit and on the dancefloor again, conducting the kind of forward-thinking electronic music that propelled him to critical acclaim in the first place. But while the instrumentation, setting, and pacing might all have changed, the principle stays the same; Cascade is, like its predecessor, hypnotic and otherworldly. Listen through the glowing eight-minute centerpiece “Ocotillo” and everything around it takes on a magical hue; listen back through – after the savasana ambience of “Ablaze” – and you’ll hear the blissed-out beauty behind every beat. He’s one of the smartest and most inventive producers in the world right now. — Alex Robert Ross

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Master guitarist and Brooklyn underground mainstay Wendy Eisenberg’s new album is about getting LASIK surgery. Lying under the laser in a bright white operating room, they experienced what it might feel like to be the lens of a camera, absorbing light but unable to process it. “Got my eyes fixed up,” she sings warily on Viewfinder’s opening track, “Lasik,” as anxiously yappy plucks on a single guitar string insist themselves upon the slower, more reticent bass, brushed cymbals, and trombone. “Sent home to rest, I stayed awake / And watched my eyes grow stronger / Watched everything get clearer.” It’s an immediately engaging opener that might reasonably lead an uninitiated Wendyhead to expect a full album of tightly wound, jazzy art songs. Considering her track record for bold experimentation, though, her ensuing left turn isn’t shocking. It’s still exciting, though: The rest of the double LP’s first disc, culminating in the symphonic “Afterimage,” traverses open seas of free jazz between continents of pulsing, tonal landmasses, though even these tend to undergo tectonic shifts in real time. “Set a Course” opens disc two with unaccompanied vocals that dissolve into dissonant instrumental tangles. Later, the boundaries between the strange and the familiar shift in and out of focus, as Eisenberg molds earlier motifs into newly mottled clay. — Raphael Helfand

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For an album that is preoccupied with what the future may hold and her own agency in that outcome, My Method Actor is Yanya’s most self-assured and driven album to date. On the British songwriter and guitarist’s first two albums — 2019 debut Miss Universe and 2022 follow-up PAINLESS — Yanya played her instrument with pace and menace. She develops that virtuosic skill on her new project with versatility and style. — David Renshaw, from our interview

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The image of “utopian music” might bring to mind new age music of various eras, serenity baths that plunge the listener deep into the tidal pool of consciousness. Another Dancer, a five-piece from Belgium, have a different vision for their self-professed vision of utopian music. It’s a lot of things: fearsome garage rock, moldy acoustic home recordings, glossy space-age Stereolab transmissions, and demo-tinged slacker synth-pop made in bedrooms with the blinds and windows open, letting the world in. I Try To Be Another Dancer, the band’s debut LP, is an overgrown garden of sonic delights, defiantly unpruned and overwhelmingly inviting. — Jordan Darville. Read our Opener interview here.

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Better Luck Next Time, the second album from Atlanta emo band worlds greatest dad, finds chief songwriter Maddie Duncan burned out and overwhelmed, questing for connection in a world that feels purpose-built to make that as difficult as possible. “I’m broke as a joke now / spent all my money on this record,” they sing between chugging guitars on “The Ocean,” “I hope that it plays out / so I don’t have to work at Checkers.” Struggling to find a balance between keeping the band going and maintaining their mental health informs much of Duncan’s writing on the album. They are exhausted and dreaming of escape on “Twenty Deer” while “Taking One For The Team” is a self-lacerating takedown of their bad habits, chiefly hanging onto painful memories and using them as chains. “I know you can be someone a little bit more happy” they sing with a sigh, while the rest of the band rally around them with a collection of power-pop hits and forays into alt-country that bolster the singalong melodies. It’s not until album closer “Speed Limit” that Duncan looks up and cherishes the things they hold dear. Among that list is “a good record filled with sorrow, and love.” With Better Luck Next Time, Duncan has created just that. No doubt it will help others feeling just like them. — David Renshaw

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Ten years on from Young Wavy, the solo tape that coalesced Ray’s style following an extended stint as part of the city’s legendary Team Eastside, Ray has little left to prove as a musician, but he’s never notched the same commercial success as contemporaries like Tee Grizzley and Sada Baby; his biggest hit to date was promptly repurposed into an even bigger hit. His fourth studio album attempts to rectify the record, positioning Ray as a behind-the-scenes impresario, avoiding the limelight out of professional expediency instead of inability. — Vivian Medithi, from our review

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LSDXOXO has been a long-time underground club staple, known for always bringing a touch of ballroom camp to high-energy, low-end productions filled with pounding bass, sensual rhythms, and mutating synth work. So when it comes to danceability, it’s unsurprising that the GHE20G0TH1K legend’s full-length debut, DOGMA, contains every one of these elements, while also marking the start of a brand new era that incorporates organic instrumentation with more confessional songwriting. Giving it a more fleshed-out feel and a sense of slow-cooker sensuality, songs like “4LUVN” are given more depth, as is album highlight “GHOST,” a steamy R&B gem featuring long-time collaborator, Kelela. — Sandra Song

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Allegra Krieger had never really confronted life-and-death stakes in her music before. Her three previous albums — 2020’s The Joys of Forgetting, 2022’s Precious Thing, and 2023’s breakthrough I Keep My Feet on the Fragile Plane — were more concerned with wresting meaning from humble, everyday details: “domestic life, going to work, what you see on your walk home from work.” On Art of the Unseen Infinity Machine, she says, “the themes feel more outward-reaching.”… Art of the Unseen Infinity Machine was recorded live in the studio across four days. It is unvarnished, preserving the warmth of the guitars on “Never Arriving” and the daydreamy electric folk of “I’m So Happy I Cannot Face Tomorrow.” The closer, “New Mexico,” is just Krieger alone above two delicate electric guitars, and it’s more arresting for that intimacy. — Alex Robert Ross, from our Opener interview.

Hear it: Spotify | Apple Music | Bandcamp